Is It Time for The Walking Dead to Make a Big Change?

Can you have too much of a terrible thing? Though The Walking Dead has, over its five grueling seasons, become an eagerly anticipated fixture on my DVR, that thought struck me while watching the premiere episode of the series’s sixth season, which debuts on AMC on Sunday night. I mean, where does this all end, where are we going? How much lurching dread can we really be exposed to before we’re numb to it, or worse, bored of it? More than the show has since its listless days on Hershel’s farm, the sixth season premiere had me wondering what, if anything, all this stress and revulsion is all really amounting to.

Which isn’t necessarily the episode’s fault. Though, for a premiere, it spends a curious amount of time eddying around in characters’ heads, rather than setting a season arc in motion—the episode is engaging enough, and scary, and all that Walking Dead stuff. Instead, I think the premiere’s arrival only a week after the finale of spin-off Fear the Walking Dead’s first season is what has me suddenly doubting my commitment to Zombie Nation. Fear the Walking Dead was an interesting exercise in figuring out how big our capacity for dwelling in this world of terror and annihilation really is, and while I actually enjoyed the new series—it’s a chilling look at the frightening, and sad, days before people realized the world was over—it added a feeling of rootlessness to the franchise that’s hard to shake.

If we’ve got these people in L.A., and of course our old friends in Georgia/Virginia, then presumably there are people all over who are experiencing their own ordeals. That notion adds a sense of infinity to the Walking Dead universe, one that makes it suddenly hard to care quite as much about the rural, cyclical struggles of Rick and the gang. Especially when, as we see in this season premiere, we’re still dealing with the same tired drama about Rick’s leadership, still watching various characters flicker in and out of PTSD-like states when it’s narratively convenient. Now that we’ve seen the Fear folks stare into the dawning oblivion, the final shot of the season a limitless, empty ocean (will next season be at sea?), I’m finding myself not sure how much longer I can trudge through this ruined world. It’s just so big and hopeless, in a way that this bleak and punishing series was probably always going to be; but at least before we traveled to the West Coast, there was the mystery of not knowing what else was out there. Maybe nothing was left but Rick and Carol and assorted friends and villains. So, best to stick close to them. There was an intimacy that encouraged intense loyalty. (Yeah, there was the disastrous trip to the C.D.C. in the first season, but that’s pretty much all we’ve heard about the outside world.)

To combat that feeling, of having lost some connection to the original series, something’s gotta change on The Walking Dead, I think. Something big. If the show, as Fear suggests, really is just a harrowing march toward nothing, with the world mostly past saving, then the series need to switch up the pace of that march, or something. I’ve no doubt that this season will show us some grim new horrors, as nearly every season of this fitfully compelling show has. But now that we know that The Walking Dead is just one part of a larger nightmare franchise, now that we’ve gotten a glimpse of a place beyond them, our beloved bedraggled southerners need to work a little harder to keep us with them, fully focused on their exploits. One thing they could do? Kill Rick.

Yeah! Kill Rick. Various people have been suggesting that for a while, but now feels like just the right time. The show needs a big jolt, a seismic one, even. Not a change of location—the show’s pretty consistent about doing that—but a realignment of its themes. And Rick is, still, the show’s largest thematic engine—he embodies the series’s big questions about the morality of survivalism, particularly whether the opposite of weakness is violence. That flesh has all been pretty well chewed over at this point, and while I don’t think the series necessarily needs to move on to entirely new questions, it could certainly pose the familiar old ones lying at the foundation of the series in new ways. A quick, drastic way to do that would be getting rid of Rick; that way someone else, or someones else, could be burdened with leading the team on their descent into the ethical dark. It may be an extreme solution, but isn’t this an extreme kind of a show?

Of course, this niggling feeling is all in reaction to exactly one episode of the new season. There might be, and likely are, terrific, game-changing things awaiting us in the second, third, fourth, etc., episodes. But the season’s slow, ponderous premiere, and the distracting existence of Fear, does give the viewer some time to let thoughts wander toward the bigger scope of this whole terrifying story, and the problems that exist within it. (Why haven’t all the zombies completely rotted by now?) Though, of course, it’s certainly possible that my sudden restlessness has more to do with overall apocalypse fatigue than it does with The Walking Dead itself—which, again, has been an absolute must-watch for a few seasons now. We’ve had an onslaught of world ending in books, movies, and television over the past decade-ish, and it just might be that two TV series set in the same dystopia, airing nearly back-to-back, has triggered or stirred up some larger weariness with the whole depressing genre.

But, if there is, rather suddenly, a problem specific to The Walking Dead, something ailing AMC’s big moneymaker, I hope the series tends to it quickly, and as mercilessly as its characters would to an infection. The show needs that kind of swift action. The Walking Dead should never feel comfortable, or really all that familiar. Because once you become desensitized to the zombie apocalypse, where the hell do you go from there?